The rumors of an imminent business shift away from internal
manufacturing and a shift towards foundries for AMD continues with a
story over at EE Times that refers to a report from financial house
FBR.

FBR claims that AMD has placed substantial microprocessor orders with
TSMC, the world's largest foundry, which could start 45nm MPU
production for AMD in 2Q08.

Though not out of the realms of reality, the rumors are so far coming from the financial community, which poses a problem!

There
are few AMD friends in that community and many more aligned with bigger
rival Intel. Nothing in this industry should be dismissed out of hand,
but I would prefer to get the ‘accurate' info from other sources than
purely from the financial community.

I am not sure about 2Q08
for TSMC starting 45nm, unless it is for low-power mobile computing as
this is in line with TSMC offering low-power 45nm node technology.
Hi-performance non-SOI CMOS technology is due later, so I query the
capability of TSMC on both the hi-end performance route with or without
the use of SOI wafers.

I also query the ability in that
timescale of AMD's ramping MPUs at TSMC due to the process and DFM
porting issues, but its just about feasible in the bigger scale of
things.

With an investor conference coming up at AMD, I doubt such rumors will go away until then!